Radio Free Island
by Signy1
Summary: The radio is quite possibly the most valuable of their material possessions. It's the single remaining thread they have to connect them with the world they've left behind, and each of the seven castaways listens to it in their own way and for their own reasons. Character study.


Gilligan listens to the radio the same way he does anything else—wholeheartedly and without reservation. He listens with his entire body. When there is music playing, he is playing along on an imaginary drum, or at least tapping his feet in time to the beat. Sports news see his fingers twitching a bit; there's no real doubt that he's seeing himself sliding into home plate, or making that hail-mary run for the end zone, or feeling the tape break across his chest as he crosses the finish line. And when the news announcer is talking, his attention is riveted, his eyes sharply focused on nothing as though he can see the story unfolding before him.

Of all of them, he's the one who seems least anxious for home and least frustrated by their continuing captivity, but his intensity as he listens to these messages from the world they've lost gives something of the lie to that carefree demeanor.

AM-FM-AM-FM-AM-FM

Mr. Howell listens to the financial news like a drowning man clutching a piece of driftwood. This was his world, this was his craft, this was who he _was_ , and listening to the ebb and flow of the market, knowing that the executors of his estate were probably bollixing up the entire business, drove him next door to mad.

He was Thurston Howell the Third, damn it all, the Wolf of Wall Street, and if there was one thing he understood, it was this. Because it wasn't just about buying or selling, it wasn't just numbers on a ticker tape or statistical patterns. No. It was about people, about being able to read them, to know what they would do, maybe even before they knew it themselves, and being able to manipulate the whole blessed universe to roll the dice your way. It was a game, and money was just the way to keep score. He had to keep himself believing that he hadn't yet lost, that all was not yet over, that he _would_ get home, get back to the world he understood and could play like a fiddle, where he knew who and what he was. So he listens to the financial reports, and charts what he would have done if he'd been able, and he's only really able to relax on the days he would have made a profit. On the days he can prove to himself that he _is_ still himself.

AM-FM-AM-FM-AM-FM

Ginger, just as avidly, listens to the Hollywood gossip, even though there's more pain in it than pleasure. It tortures her to hear the opportunities slipping through her fingers. She was losing time, and she knew it, and time, for an actress, is a very finite commodity. She wouldn't be young and pretty forever, after all, and her window was closing. There were so many roles she wanted to play, and so many films she knows she could have done… if fate had been a bit kinder. She'd been so utterly close to the big time, to the day she could put the B movies and the naughty photographs and the nightclub gigs firmly in her rear view mirror. She'd already gotten further than most of the star-struck redheads who flocked to Hollywood every year, and she'd sweated blood to do it, and she didn't begrudge a drop. She was _Ginger Grant_ , and that was starting to mean something. She'd gotten that far, and she would have gone still farther; all she'd needed was that one good part, something big, to establish her as the serious actor she knew she was, or at least that she knew she could have been.

Could have been. Would have been. Should have been. Has been. A year is eternity in Hollywood, and it had already been longer than that. In another couple of years no one would even remember her name, whether she was rescued or not, and she knows it. But she's a professional, and she listens to the casting calls for each new film that she would have been perfect for with an expression of coolly objective interest that would have convinced any director and fooled any audience.

AM-FM-AM-FM-AM-FM

Mary Ann is addicted to soap operas. She is quietly—or not so quietly—insistent on her fair share of time with the radio, and she wouldn't have willingly missed an episode of _Old Doctor Young_ for anything. Nobody likes to anger the person who's feeding them, so there's usually no argument; the radio is hers for the space of that half-hour.

Her aunt loved the program as much as she did; it had been her aunt who had first gotten her listening to it. Mary Ann can all but see her now, standing at her kitchen table, kneading the bread dough or peeling the potatoes as she listens to the ever-wilder contortions of the plot, her hands never still and her mind firmly elsewhere, far away from the ceaseless drudgery of a farmer's wife.

"The work needs doing, Mary Ann, and that's one thing you can count on," she'd say as she tuned the radio. "There will always be work that needs doing, and there's pride to be found in doing it well. But never forget that there's a wide world beyond the back forty, too, and even if you don't go looking for it, than at least you can let it come to you."

Well, she'd gone looking for the wide world, all right, and she still wasn't entirely sure just what she'd found, but she knows this much for certain. For that half-hour, her aunt is enmeshed in the same story, the same other world that she is, and it's almost as though they were listening together.

So Mary Ann listens to her soap operas, the wildly melodramatic schemes and romances and tragedies that even she is perfectly well aware are silly, and she can see another world, another life, as she chops pineapple or grates coconut. Her hands never still. And her mind far away.

AM-FM-AM-FM-AM-FM

Mrs. Howell listens to society news, because in many ways it's like getting a letter from home. She knew many of the people mentioned in those broadcasts; they had been her friends, in the guarded, ever-so-slightly catty manner that was all she'd ever really known for much of her life. All smiles and air kisses to one's face, and bitter jockeying for position below the surface. The sort of friend who could distill more and purer poison into a well-timed 'why, hello, _darling_ ,' than Lucretia Borgia had in her entire arsenal.

And she had been in the thick of it; she'd been a queen of society, the shining light of a thousand _salons_ and a canny player of the great game. If she knew what they really thought and, likely, said when her back was turned, and she had a fair idea, well, she also knew that they were quite as fully aware what she truly thought of them. And she misses it, she misses it dreadfully. The gowns, and the elegant banquets, and the jewels, and, if there was a subtle, deadly fencing match beneath the honeyed conversation, that was simply the price one had to pay. So she listens to the radio, waiting to hear about their old acquaintances, and she tries not to think that she'd have called them friends not so long ago. Before she'd, perhaps, learned a truer definition of that overabused word.

AM-FM-AM-FM-AM-FM

The Professor didn't particularly care what they listened to. He listens to world news, human interest fluff pieces, sports, quiz shows or anything else with comparatively equal relish; no knowledge, in his view, was ever wasted. He was a man whose mind grew hungry far more insistently than did his body, and while his books had helped keep him sane, by this point he knew them all but by heart, and the _World of Facts_ had little left to offer him by way of distraction. On the rare occasions that a science program comes on, of course, he couldn't be drawn away from the radio with a derrick, and he lives more fully in those moments than many people do in a year.

He listens intently, neatly filing away each new nugget of information in the appropriate mental pigeonhole, because it's better than nothing. And not counting the radio, and aside from his own studies of the island's native plant and animal life, as regards new knowledge, _nothing_ is almost the sum total of what he has. He lives in mortal dread of the day the radio fails them; no battery can be recharged indefinitely, and his experiments with alternative means of powering it, such as their faithful pedal-powered dynamo, have proved, to date, entirely non-viable.

He keeps that to himself, though; why burden the others? It would happen when it happened, and there would be no remedy. For now, he listens to whatever is available, ravenously hungry. Silently afraid.

AM-FM-AM-FM-AM-FM

The Skipper listens to the war news with the others, his face a carefully blank mask, but often excuses himself after the broadcast was over, always with a casually airtight excuse for being elsewhere. If at all possible, when the news is particularly bad, he tries to go off somewhere to be alone while he gets himself back together, and, lately, it seemed that the news was always bad.

Wasn't WWII enough? Wasn't Korea enough? How much more blood needed to soak into the sands? How many more men— _boys_ —needed to die before enough was finally enough?

The radio had been a comfort, once. It was a link to the world outside their tiny island, a reminder that there _was_ a world out there. Now, though, it seems that the radio is doing nothing but mocking him with his own helplessness, his own failures, his own impotence.

On one such day, the Skipper was on the beach, ostensibly looking for driftwood, when Gilligan materialized out of the jungle like a ghost. The Skipper braced himself for questions he didn't want to answer. But they never came; he just walked across the sand towards the Skipper, who was sitting on a log, and he didn't say anything. In one fluid movement he folded himself to the ground, legs crossed, elbows on knees, chin on hands. The Skipper had never been that flexible, not even when he'd been twenty years younger and fifty pounds lighter, and he wondered irritably whether his crewman even had bones, or if he was made entirely from tendon and rubber.

They sat in silence for a while, watching the ocean lick at the shore.

The Skipper hadn't had any intention of talking about it, and if any of the others had been there, he wouldn't have. And if Gilligan had asked him questions, he wouldn't have answered them. But maybe that was it. Maybe the very fact that no one was demanding anything of him made it possible to let it out. "I should be over there," he admitted for the first time. "I should be doing my part."

Gilligan nodded, and he looked… older, somehow. "We both should," he said, simply.

And it doesn't change a damned thing, because the fact is that they're _not_ where they could be doing some good. They're _not_ serving their country the way they'd sworn to do, the way they'd been trained to do. They're here, on this remote little sandbar-with-pretensions, while their brothers-in-arms fall by the thousands, and there's not much hope that that's going to change anytime soon. But at least, God be thanked, he's not alone. Someone understands.


End file.
